Youth MP sheds light on the cost-of-living crisis at Youth Parliament 2025

By Aman Khalid, Youth Press Gallery, Youth Parliament 2025

Note: Articles in this newsletter edition were produced by the Youth Press Gallery at various stages of the Youth Parliament 2025 programme. Accordingly, the content presented reflects the context and timing at the date of its original writing.

If there is one subject that resonates across Aotearoa New Zealand more than rugby or fish and chips, it’s the severe cost of living crisis - if you’re not personally affected, chances are you know someone who is. Earlier this month, the triennial Youth Parliament brought together 143 young Kiwis from every corner of the country at the Beehive to learn about the political process and discuss the issues shaping their lives and futures. Various matters were highlighted within the Debating Chamber, such as the lack of mental health support, the need for more youth-focused community spaces and the country’s broken education system.

However, one particularly passionate speech was given by Youth MP for Ginny Andersen, Tautalaleleia Sa’u, who used his allocated three minutes to speak about the cost-of-living crisis many young people are struggling with today. Sa’u, a proud Samoan and first-year law student at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, has witnessed these struggles firsthand in his community, saying he has “spoken to tamariki who walk 40 minutes to school in the rain because their family can’t afford petrol.”

The average weekly rent in New Zealand has climbed to $575 in 2025, latest data from Infometrics.co.nz shows - a 2.7% increase from the previous year. However, putting statistics aside, Sa’u said: “Let’s say you earn $500 a week, and pay $400 in rent, how do you survive? How do you afford power, food, petrol, school, life?”

His question was simply a wake-up call that the crisis is not just about numbers on a page, but the fact that many people are often left with no real choices, just sacrifices. Food or rent. Heating or medical care. Not the “cost of living” but “the cost of breath”, as Sa’u continued to describe in his speech. For many families, it is the “cost of seeing tomorrow, the cost of the future, and the cost of who’s gonna eat and who isn’t.”

In a nation where a block of butter, a single piece of fruit, and even bus fares have become unaffordable luxuries for some, if there is anything we can take away from Sa’u’s speech, it is that the cost of living crisis cannot be a problem left to fix in some distant future; it is a present issue affecting young people’s potential every day.

But what now? When rangatahi (young people) are using their once-in-three-years opportunity in the Debating Chamber to speak out against a crisis impacting their entire generation, it reflects how the cost-of-living crisis has become impossible to ignore, and is one that many of us are all too familiar with by now. And yet, what this also reflects is the determination of youth like Sa’u, who are willing to use such an opportunity to speak honestly about the harsh realities many people are facing - today’s youth really are the future of Aotearoa New Zealand.

So overall, Youth Parliament this year showed that young people across the country aren’t afraid to speak up about the challenges they face, and the future they want. And for Youth MP Tautalaleleia Sa’u, that future is where “every child in Aotearoa has a bed to sleep in, warm clothes to wear, food to eat, and hope for a fairer tomorrow.”

Because a country without a future for its young people is a country without a future at all.

As Sa’u asked in the chamber, “To what cost will rangatahi have to pay to live a simple life? People cannot fight for their rights if they’re too busy fighting to survive.”

Youth MP Tautalaleleia Sa’u delivering his speech in the Debating Chamber at Youth Parliament 2025. Photo by Aman Khalid, 2025 Youth Press Gallery member